From Development Theory to Practice

Sen’s freedom-centred approach to development is an approach which is concerned with ‘the expansion of substantive human freedoms’ (Drèze and Sen, 2002, p. 3), which holds ‘individual agency [as] ultimately central to addressing these deprivations [of substantive human freedoms]’ (Sen, 1999b, p. xi), and which ‘cannot be dissociated from participation’ (Sen, 1999b, p. 249). I have argued in the previous chapters that, for the capability approach to be a guiding theory for development praxis, for it to provide theoretical insights for orienting policies towards the removal of unfreedoms, it will need to be ‘thickened’ with a certain vision of the good life, with certain moral principles which assess the extent to which political freedom has been conducive to the removal of unfreedoms, and with an analysis of the structure of a country’s socio-historical agency (an analysis of a country’s collective capability to remove unfreedoms). The next chapters will illustrate these theoretical arguments. More specifically, they will illustrate that, without an explicit acknowledgment of the central role of socio-historical agency in promoting human well-being, without thickening the capability approach with socio-historical narratives which render an account of that agency, the capability approach does not shed sufficient light on the processes through which some countries have more successfully than others promoted human freedoms.